[Dean's World] Celia Farber: Serge Lang: Father of Accuracy in Journalism

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Celia Farber:
Serge Lang: Father of Accuracy in Journalism
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1200808026.shtml


   Tonight I didn't want to talk to a living soul, but I did urgently
   want to talk to a dead man.

   I pulled Serge Lang's Challenges from my shelf tonight and sat with it
   like an old friend; I hadn't realized he inscribed it, "To Celia
   Farber, who's been a rallying point for many, with appreciation, S
   Lang 24 March 99."

   I miss him very much. I didn't get as close to him as I could have,
   because I was intimidated. I have some of his legendary phone messages
   entombed on answering machines I now refuse to discard. On one he
   growls: "This is not Celia Farber. This is Celia Farber's answering
   machine!"

   If you want to know who Serge was, Google his name, and linger a while
   on the "Bourbaki Group," and "Challenges," which has done more for
   journalistic ethics than every journalism school combined times ten.
   "I do not ask to be trusted," (Lang wrote briskly, and was thereby
   trusted.)

   He applied to journalism the same standards of rigor, accuracy,
   objectivity, clarity, and reality that he applied to mathematics (the
   goal of Bourbaki.)

   His chief medium was what he called "the file"--a method of keeping
   close track of communications, and holding people accountable to their
   written words. They couldn't run, blow smoke, posture, or invoke
   immaculate liberal politics; They had to stand by their words. They
   had to provide sources. When they couldn't, he pinned them like an
   eager lepidopterist pins butterflies: Most famously, Samuel P.
   Huntington, (for classifying South Africa in the late 1960s as a
   "satisfied society") Fareed Zakaria, (TNR) Richard Horton, Robert
   Gallo, Alexander Cockburn, Jared Diamond, David Baltimore, and many
   others found themselves in what Lang called the "pernicious" tradition
   of dishonest discourse.

   Once when I asked him a very dumb question which was...vaporous and
   subjective, he hollered: "Watch out...I will open a file on you!" Then
   he laughed.

   I have been torn to shreds, beaten to within an inch of my life by
   people who destest my journalism.

   But if Serge Lang had ever turned his guns on me I would have never
   written another word. I truly think he was an icon on social
   journalism--an avatar and a lighthouse and a one man standard.

   "I would like people to use this book to stimulate their own thinking
   about analogous problems which they will encounter in their own life,"
   Lang wrote in Challenges. "..I am very much bothered by the
   inaccuracies, ambiguities, code words, slogans, catch phrases, public
   relation devices, sweeping generalizations, and stereotypes, which are
   used (consciously or otherwise) to influence people...I am bothered by
   the way misinformation is accepted uncritically, and by the way some
   people are unable or unwilling to recognize it or reject it. On the
   other hand, I am equally bothered by having seen some students are
   unwilling to speak out for fear of jeopardizing their grades and their
   future...I am not interested in mere discussion. I want corrective
   action, but I have found that the ordinary media are clogged up to
   such an extent that to be effective and to meet standards of accuracy
   and completeness, I had to create my own medium. Thus I created what I
   call the "file" as a stage on which documentation and confrontations
   of views could be presented. I have made about twenty other files over
   the last decade."

   They used to arrive with a thump in my mailbox, Lang's "files."

   They were a redress to the enveloping silence that has gripped the
   life of ideas and science like a toxic moss. Lang was man enough to
   make noise, to stand by something stated rather than hide behind the
   unstated.

   A man says what he thinks. He never backs down for the sake of
   politics, advancement, social lubrication, etc. He has a longer
   career, as Yevtushenko pointed out in "A Career," in the next life
   than he does in this one. His name lasts forever.

   It wasn't until I was at Serge's memorial service at Yale that I
   learned who he was, in full, and what his contributions to mathematics
   were. The mathematical giants who convened there, some of them in
   wheelchairs, gave generously of their time, explained who he was, and
   who he was to them, in New Haven cafes that night and the next day.
   The AIDS war was a somewhat sensitive subject. The Yale mathematics
   community didn't necessarily enjoy the window of hellfire Lang's
   social engagement in the matter opened up, but they repeated one thing
   with downcast eyes, in so many words, tinged with lament: "Serge was
   never wrong."

   They wished they had done more to fight the malignant, metastasizing
   dishonesty of AIDS discourse; They wished they had helped him...the
   way he always helped others. Until he died, it never really occurred
   to anybody that he was terribly burdened.

   I got to be close friends with a circle of his students, and we even
   traveled to Sweden together this summer.

   What did Lang die of?

   Sometimes I press them and sometimes I leave it alone. Sean can't cope
   with it at all and neither can Vincent. Sean tells a great story of
   how Serge, driving a convertible Mustang, would roar around the Yale
   campus loudly. "You peeled out," Sean, who worked at the local garage
   told Serge. Serge bristled.

   "I did not peel out."

   Sean was adamant.

   "You did. You peeled out."

   Stories about Serge abound, fall like snow. His utter intellectual
   supremacy (the Ivy leagues fought over him; He picked Yale based on
   cafeteria conversations with students)coupled with his total lack of
   elitism, snobbery, climberism, or any other Power qualities that
   almost invariably accompany Men of Genius. He was close to the earth
   and of it because he wanted what it yielded: Data.

   He was "found dead" in his study in Berkeley, shortly after retiring,
   and shortly after a furious, profane battle with AIDS ideologues which
   I can document another time.

   He and I had been in contact more than ever before in the months
   before his death.

   He called one night to ask me to read the work of a prized student of
   his, Peter Doshi, on distortions in flu epidemiology. I said I would
   be happy to, and I was. He also said he was very worried about Peter
   Duesberg, who he supported, befriended...and now believed was
   "cracking."

   But it was Serge himself who was cracking, after two decades of
   fighting the un-fightable, the freakish, abnormal, infinitely
   self-resurrecting melting clock of HIV/AIDS science. (For the entire
   record on that you can go to the Serge Lang Memorial HIV/AIDS archive
   on the internet.)

   Serge, around this time, (2005,) was also deeply engaged in, and
   disgusted by, the Institute of Medicine's whitewashing of the HIVNET
   study that enabled the toxic, ineffective drug Nevirapine to be given
   like communion wafers to African women in labor.

   When the IOM's panel, stacked with pharmaceutical prostitutes,
   declared the obscene study to be solid and sound, its conclusions
   verified, Lang was well beyond anger. He called me to discuss it and I
   heard in his voice an unfamiliar stillness, a gravity.

   "What they have done is so monstrous," he said slowly in his not quite
   French accent.

   I wrote "so monstrous," on my notepad. I was not yet obese with
   failure, then. I kept telling Lang it would all come to light, be
   alright, not to worry. I was still thinking, then, that we could all
   survive this and meet on the other end and raise our glasses.

   I was locking my front door when I heard a voice that sounded like
   Peter Duesberg on my answering machine. His voice was black, bereft.

   I raced to pick up the phone and I said, "Peter, is everything
   alright?"

   He said: "Not really."

   After a silence he said:

   "Serge is dead."